by Hiromi Goto
Vast rows upon rows, beds of peat and darkly, richly wet. And mushrooms. Such mushrooms. They gleamed like newly hatched silk-worms, like jellyfish and oysters. The only sound the drip drip of moisture condensed on the ceiling, plipping into tiny puddles on the damp cement floor. Welcome, welcome, into this world of moist. She walked between the longs rows of beds, through puddles warm as blood and stood naked in the centre of the room. The fungal silence as thick as the moisture around her. And she lay down, spread her arms, her legs wide and peat water soaking, lay down, in puddles warm and glowing. Closed her eyes, feeling the seeping the sinking into. Slipped deeper, and deeper, her eyes closed, her hands floating on the water. Floating towards herself. Followed the bones of her ribs to curving flesh. She stroked her breasts, the soft skin of her nipples, pinched gently the skin puckering with sudden ache. Touched her own breasts as she would if they were another’s. Cupped them in her palms and held them like two hearts. Her legs stirred in the peaty water, the rich scent headier than any musk, any perfume. The soft wet mud kisses on her cheek, inner arms, the skin beneath her knees. Along her inner thighs. She left brown fingers of peat etched on her breasts. Her hands smoothed down, down, swell of belly, curving to her pleasure. Softly, softly, her hands, her fingers, the moisture, her ache, peat warm as blood, the moisture seeping into hair, skin, parchment softening elastic stretch of muscles gleaming a filament of light. Murmur murmur forming humming earth tipping under body swelling growing resound and the SLAM of breath knocked from lungs, beyond the painful register of human sound, the unheard chorus of mushrooms.
We lie on our giant futon, so big that it covers completely the floor of your bedroom. It is a decadent pleasure. There is no frame beneath us, just the futon, and our naked bodies on top. We move in our sleep, all over the expanse of the floor, then meet each other in surprise when we wake up.
You are asleep. You were tired and couldn’t stay awake. But the stories, true or not, are waiting to be told. I cannot hold them until you are ready to hear them, so I keep on saying the words out loud and you nod, your eyelids flicker in your sleep. Trust me.
Here’s a true story . . .
MURASAKI
Local Elderly Woman Disappears
Search Continues
Late Tuesday night, the immigrant mother-in-law of local mushroom farmer, Sam Tonkatsu went missing during blizzard-like snow conditions.
“We’re very worried,” says Sam’s wife. “We just want her to come home.”
Local RCMP and neighboring ranchers are combing the countryside, but weather conditions hinder their search.
“Cases like this are difficult,” says Constable Norton. “An elderly woman isn’t likely to survive a single night during weather like we’ve been experiencing.”
What is surprising is that most town folk were unaware that the old woman was even living with the Tonkatsus.
Foul play has been ruled out.
“What happened to your grandma?”
“She went back to Japan. She got sick of all this snow and dust and up and left. I don’t blame her.”
“What happened to your grandma?”
“She went ape-shit and was raving, frothing at the mouth and she ran naked from the house screaming like the pagan she was.”
“What happened to your grandma?”
“She started to grow fur all over her body and at first, we thought it was a symptom of illness or something like she wasn’t eating enough so her body was compensating with fur to keep her warm but we found out she was actually a tanuki who had assumed the form of a woman so she could marry my grandfather because he had set her free from a trap and she wanted to thank him by becoming his wife, but now, she wanted to return to the wilds whence she came.”
I found out then, that everybody, including me, was always looking for a story. That the story could be anything. They would eat it.
“What happened to your Obāchan?” he asked, touching my hair, my face, just so.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I won’t know until she leaves again.”
“How can she leave again if she’s already gone?”
“She can leave again with me.”
He didn’t say anything. Just touched my hair, my face. Just so.
Mind you, the story can be anything, but there have to be details. People love details. The stranger, the more exotic, the better. “Oooooh,” they say. “Aaaaaaah.” Nothing like a freak show to make you feel normal, safe by comparison. “Tell us about the feet,” they say. “Did your grandmother have to bind her feet when she was little?” Actually, feet were never bound in Japan, but someone keeps on perpetuating this. It always goes back to that. The binding of the feet. Deformities. Ritual Hari Kari. Actually, it’s harakiri but go on saying Hairy Carrie for all I care. It’s not about being bitter. You’re invited somewhere to be a guest speaker. To give a keynote address. Whatever that is. Everybody in suits and ties and designer dresses. You’re the only coloured person there who is not serving food. It’s not about being bitter. You just notice. People talk race this ethnic that. It’s easy to be theoretical if the words are coming from a face that has little or no pigmentation. If your name is Hank and you have three blond kids, no one will come up to you in the Safeway produce section and point at a vegetable and ask, “What is that?”
I was standing in the ethnicChinesericenoodleTofupattiesexotic vegetable section of Safeway. Fingering, squeezing stroking Japanese eggplants for firmness, taut shiny purple skin and no rust spots. I love shopping. The touching of vegetables. Lingering of fruits and tap tapping my fingers on watermelon husks. Just minding my business and choosing eggplants.
“What is that, exactly? I’ve always wondered.”
I looked up from my reverie and a face peered down on me. A kindly face. An interested face.
“It’s an eggplant.”
“Oh really!” Surprisewonderjoy. “How wonderful! This is what our eggplants look like. They’re so different!” She held up a round almost-black solid eggplant. Bitter skin and all. She looked up at the handmade signs above the vegetables with the prices marked in dollars per pound.
“What are they called in your language?”
I looked up at the signs.
“I don’t speak Chinese,” I said.
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Sorry for what? I wondered. And there, right above the eggplants where all the other handwritten signs were:
I took the long and graceful eggplant I still held in my hand and smacked it smartly against the sign.
“Here. Here it is,” I said. And turned my back to examine hakusai leaves. Suey Choy in Chinese according to the Safeway produce staff. Leave me in peace. Let a woman choose her vegetables in peace. Vegetable politics.
Mom never bought eggplants when she went shopping. Not even the hugely round black Canadian kind. Who knows where they come from. She didn’t buy hakusai or shōga or shiitake or daikon or satoimo or moyashi or nira. There was a vegetable blind spot in her chosen menu and Obāchan must have felt it sorely. I only noticed what I was missing after I began to question. When I was in a position to miss something I never knew I had missed. But there was one thing Mom could forgive and that was a box of Jap oranges for Christmas. Funny how they’re called Jap oranges. When they are technically called Mandarin oranges and Mandarin isn’t even a place but a Chinese language. Funny how words and meaning twist beyond the dimensions of logic. Mom wasn’t very logical either. She thought if the church could buy Christmas oranges, then she might make this one allowance and I wouldn’t be contaminated. I couldn’t get enough. I hunkered beneath our twinkle tree and alternately wolfed them down or sucked like a thirsty man after crossing a desert of mashed potato. I ate so many at once that my skin started changing colour. Funny thing. If you eat too many Jap oranges, your skin turns yellow.
I was lying beneath the absurd lights flicker flacker and sweet tang of pine sap, an empty Mandarin orange box and green tissue squares all around me. I was replet
e. I looked it up in the dictionary and that’s exactly how I felt. I raised my fingers to my nose and citric sour smell of peel. I sniffed again. Held my hands above my head and looked at the twinkle tree between my fingers. And I noticed it. Funny, I thought, my hands look yellow. Maybe it’s the Christmas lights. Pulled my hands up close and stared. No, they were definitely yellow. Turning brighter by the minute and spreading down my arms. I laughed out loud.
“Look Mom!” I yelled. Just as excited as the time I had red shit from eating too many beets. “Lookit my hands!”
Mom turned from the sink, pushed her glasses up her nose a bit and peered down on my palms.
“Oh God,” an invocation as opposed to a curse. “Oh my God.” She grabbed my wrists and dragged me to the sink.
“Ouch!” I said, tugging back. “Ouch, don’t! It’s only the oranges. I ate the whole box, that’s all.”
She turned the hot water on full blast. Dumped Sunlight on my hands and started scrubbing with an SOS pad.
“Ow!” I screamed. “Don’t Mom! It’s only the oranges! It’s only the oranges!”
“Yellow,” she was muttering, not even hearing me. “Yellow, she’s turningyellow she’sturningyellow she’s—”
Obāchan, whose voice was constant as the prairie wind, who hadn’t stopped muttering, singing, humming, yelling for as long as I could ever remember. Who never stopped voicing her very existence. That was the only time Obāchan ever stopped her refrain. The only time that sound stopped pouring from her mouth. The sudden silence after fourteen years of torrential words hit Mom over the head like a concrete block. She dropped my hands and muttered something about a headache and went upstairs to lie down and didn’t get up again for three days. Like Christ. I rinsed my tender hands in cool water. Walked down the hall to Obāchan’s chair. I crawled into her lap, even though my elbows and knees spilled every which way, and snuggled my head into her skinny neck. Obāchan started her soothing refrain again.
It’s funny how you can sift your memories, braid them with other stories. Come up with a single strand and call it truth.
Of course everything wasn’t hunky dory between my Obāchan and me. It’s easy to be romantic when she has been gone for over ten years and you live in a split-level bungalow in north west Calgary. When you deliver newspapers in the middle of the night, volunteer for the Committee Against Racism and sleep long and warm during the brightness of the day. Of course there was tension because she lived with us in Nanton and couldn’t keep her mouth shut. Of course there were times when I was acutely embarrassed. Of course.
“What’s your grandma saying?” Patricia asked, when she stepped inside our door for the first time. Obāchan was patting her on the head like a puppy and chatting away. We had been assigned out-of-town pals in school for when blizzards made the roads too dangerous to travel. The pals got to stay over night in town until the weather calmed down enough for them to get home.
“Uhhmm,” I thought frantically. Patricia was the most popular girl in class and I desperately wanted to be her best friend. “She says she’s really happy to meet you and she hopes we can be good and kind friends with each other and uhhmmm, she likes your hair like that and uhhhmmmm, maybe we ought to play outside until supper.”
“But it’s blizzarding outside,” Patricia said, smiling.
“Uh, yeah. I guess she must be joking. Ha ha.”
Mom had left us Oreos for a snack, and we gulped cold milk to wash down the cookie mud. It was freezing inside the house and Obāchan was yelling to drown out the wind. Her chair creaking beneath the force of her voice. Patricia didn’t say anything, but she kept looking at me when she thought I wouldn’t notice. Kept glancing at Obāchan who didn’t move from her chair. We sat down to watch The Flintstones but the howling wind, my noisy Obāchan, the snow snaking around our ankles made it all impossible.
“Do you want to explore the mushroom farm?” I asked.
“Yeah! That’d be neat.”
We bundled up with snow clothes, still wet and icy. I leaned over to give Obāchan a peck on the cheek, and she nodded, but didn’t stop her voice from challenging the blizzard wind. Wrapped itchy cold scarves around our heads so that only our eyes peeped out. And stepped outside into a blast of ice pellets.
We trudged to the mushroom farm, the west wind blowing knives into our backs, snaking around to fling daggers from the north. A heavy moisture steam surrounded the two buildings. They were shrouded with mist that no amount of wind could whisk away.
“They look like enchanted castles!” Patricia yelled above the slice of wind.
“Yeah,” I yelled back, then muttered beneath my breath, “or a penitentiary.”
“What’s in this building?” Patricia pointed to the first barn.
“That’s just the compost building. It stinks in there. And it’ll get into your clothes. The growing barn is better. There’s more to see,” I panted. The wind was snatching my air away before I had time to gulp it.
“All right. Let’s go in. I’m freezing!”
We tried to open the little side door, the bottom of it raised two feet off the ground, but it was frozen shut. We took turns kicking until it burst in and we both tried to squeeze through at the same time. Laughing, screeching, we tumbled inside and fell into a heap. I kicked the door shut from where we were lying, still giggling uncontrollably.
“What are you doing, Girl?”
I nearly fell out of my skin and Patricia gave a little gasp. Joe had been standing there the whole time, but we hadn’t seen him in the dim light.
“Nothing,” I scowled.
“You coming to pick? Your friend too.”
“No. I’m just showing Patricia the mushroom farm. No one said anything about working. We came to play here, because it’s too cold to play outside.”
“Ohhh?” Joe said, in his annoying way. “You want to make boxes?”
“No! We don’t want to make boxes!” I yelled, and grabbed Patricia’s hand and we fled down the huge cavernous hall, our feet ringing echoes on the sheets of metal covering the drainage ditch.
“Who was that?” Patricia whispered. We had made it to the coffee room and there were cake donuts left over from the three o’clock break. We realised that we were soaking wet from moisture and sweat. The humidity inside kept the warmth right next to our skin, and we couldn’t undress fast enough. Kicked heavy moonboots off our heels and tore snow pants off our legs. Flung our scarves from our faces and left our jackets lying where they fell.
“That was Joe,” I scoffed, showing off. “He’s our manager. But he doesn’t boss me around.”
We poured ourselves coffee and dumped three lumps of sugar and three spoonfuls of Coffeemate into our Styrofoam cups. Ate the donuts.
“He’s kinda cute!” Patricia giggled. I was shocked and embarrassed at the same time.
“Joe?! You’ve got to be kidding? He’s like forty or something. He’s a Boat Person!” Like that would explain everything.
“I still think he’s kinda cute,” Patricia said, confused at my denial. “You’re Japanese, but I still think you’re pretty too.”
“Thanks,” I said. Confused, myself, for what I didn’t know. “Let’s go exploring.”
We left the break room in short sleeved T-shirts and my mushroom picking runners I kept at the farm. Our tummies sloshing with weak, sweet coffee. I showed Patricia a room where the mushrooms were growing. In the silent hum of wet darkness, the mushrooms glowed like cave fish.
“Wow,” she whispered. Like in church. “Wow. I thought you grew mushrooms in the fields or something. Or inside a greenhouse. Not like this.”
We stood in the front of the room, listening to moisture condense on the walls, then slowly stream downward. Patricia mesmerized, and I was wondering why I had never noticed Joe’s looks before. There was the clang cling of buckets and the pickers filed into the room.
“Oh! Murio! Are you picking?” Jane asked. She was the head picker, and Joe’s wife.
“No
,” I sighed. “I’m just showing my friend the farm.”
“Oh, that’s nice. Nice to meet you. I’m Jane, Joe’s wife,” she said, and held out her mushroom stained hand. Her fingers caked with mushroom skin.
Patricia held out her hand and shook.
“Pleased to meet you. I’m Patricia. I think Joe is very handsome!” Patricia giggled, and Jane giggled with her, turning bright red with pride and embarrassment.
“Yes, I think so too,” she giggled and yelled out in Vietnamese so everyone could know. The women stopped picking to laugh and laugh, tears dropping from their eyes. Patricia laughed with them and I stood watching from outside the small circular glow of Jane’s mushroom-picking light.
“Nice friend,” Jane said, patting my arm. “Maybe you won’t be so lonely now.”
“Yeah,” I said, “yeah, I hope so.” I felt so funny that I had to do something with my hands. I just couldn’t play while everyone worked around me, so Patricia and I made cardboard boxes and stacked them ten high until Mom phoned from the house to tell us to come back for supper.
“Making boxes isn’t so bad,” Patricia yelled above the howling of the wind. “Lots better than slopping pigs and cleaning out their shit. Race ya!”
We stumbled, plodded, through drifts of snow in our heavy moonboots. Laughing icy knives into our lungs. As we came closer to the house, I could smell a special occasion ham burning in the oven.
I felt for Mom too, you know. Don’t get me wrong. You couldn’t have a bridge party if you had an immigrant mother who sat muttering beside the door. Who waited for people to enter so she could spit foreign words at them. She would stare people in the eyes and never turn away or blink. It made it impossible for the macaroons to go down the throat. And a prayer meeting would turn into an exorcism if Obāchan started howling back at the wind. So Mom made her choices and she lived with the consequences. She always talked about Silver Springs but she never packed Obāchan’s things. And she always washed Obāchan’s hair. Mom isn’t the wicked mother figure in the Walt Disney cast of good guys and bad guys. It was another thing of parent/ child conflict. Add a layer of cultural displacement and the tragedy is complete.